ONCE IN A LIFETIME

A runtime of 168 minutes is no small engagement for a feature film - but it may not be quite enough to capture an entire lifetime. It's an ambitious undertaking, even for the prodigiously talented David Fincher, whose new romantic epic, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, covers the wanderlust of its titular character as he ages in reverse - from Benjamin's crippled, elderly birth to his death as an infant.

After directing the thrilling (and vastly underappreciated) Zodiac, Fincher has turned his lens to something far more nostalgic. His focus is now life and death, instead of just the latter, and, if nothing else, the elegant film should silence critics who have previously derided the director as cold and clinical.

With a dusty amber tint in the air, Fincher and director of photography Claudio Miranda (Failure to Launch) glide through and linger in the life of Benjamin (Brad Pitt, Burn After Reading) as he ventures backward into existence. Born as a pint-sized old man knocking on death's door, Benjamin is left by his father (Jason Flemyng, Mirrors) on the stoop of an assisted living home in New Orleans at the conclusion of World War I.

The hefty narrative is framed by the destruction of the city on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, as told by Caroline (Julia Ormond, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl), the daughter of Benjamin's lifelong love, Daisy (Cate Blanchett, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). As Daisy lays on her deathbed, the storm beating away at the window, she has her daughter read Benjamin's diary.

It may seem a bit timely, but screenwriters Eric Roth (Lucky You) and Robin Swicord (The Jane Austen Book Club) carefully include New Orleans as one of the fallen in what is essentially a story about coping with the passing of time and loss - both senseless and natural, and yet always bound by fate.

From a deceptively young age, Benjamin - who appears to be a man in his late 80s - discovers death in a way no real person could ever hope (or want) to. He is a child trapped in an old man's body, watching the elderly occupants of the home come and go while he desires to experience a somewhat more normal childhood.

The visual effects employed are simply remarkable. Forward or backward, never have filmmakers aged a cast so believably. Of course, it would all be a $150 million gimmick if not for the talent behind the prosthetics.

Pitt, while given a somewhat wooden and esoteric Southern gentleman to work with, imbues Benjamin with the tragedy and complexity necessary to make the film work. When he meets his first love (Tilda Swinton, Burn After Reading) after taking off from home, we realize Benjamin will never truly connect with anyone for too long.

As his childhood sweetheart Daisy filters in and out of his life (Blanchett commands the screen, as always), Benjamin either is too mature or too young, except for the brief period when they meet in the middle in their 40s.

The troubled relationship and the age rift propel Button's most inspired moments. Despite the magnetism of its leads and supports (Taraji P. Henson is fantastic as Benjamin's foster mother, Jared Harris equally so as his captain and father figure), the film sags under the burden of its mission: to relay every last turn of the strange life of a man.

We gather little from Benjamin's brief foray into the Navy aboard a tug boat during World War II, aside from the notion that not all losses are created equal - many come far too early and for no reason at all.

Few stretches of the film manage to recapture the energetic opening centered on Benjamin's curious upbringing. The anti-coming-of-age story plays much better than Benjamin's perpetual mid-life crises and threads the themes of aging and death more subtly than in the longer narrative.

It's all too easy to relate Button to Roth's other, inferior Southern man epic, Forrest Gump, which had neither the style nor the power of Fincher's direction to guide it. Aside from the less-caricatured performances given in Button, Fincher elevates the weaker elements of the screenplay with the strength of his images: 23-year-old Daisy dancing against a foggy night; a young, old man coming to his right of passage in a boozy burlesque house; and an infant unlearning how to walk next to one of many mother figures.

Like life itself, Button is a beautiful mess and probably could not have come out any other way.

zherrm@gmail.com

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 stars